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Individual Rights

Rights are a formal codification of human freedom.

Rights state explicitly the fact that no other person or institution has rightful jurisdiction over the person or property of another.

Justice — also known as equity — is nothing more or less than the legal recognition of each and every individual’s right to her own life and her own property.

The Oxford Dictionary defines the term rights as, in part, “A justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way.”

Freedom is the absence of compulsion.

The primary thing that distinguishes the free person from the unfree person is voluntary action versus action that is compelled.

Compulsory taxation, for instance, means that you are not free to do whatever you wish with your own money, because the government may at any time legally compel you to give to government any amount it specifies.

Voluntary action hinges upon the principle of individual rights:

Are we each free to live as we choose, provided we do not infringe upon the equal rights of others?

Or not?

The most fundamental political question is this: Do we rightfully own ourselves, or do others rightfully have jurisdiction over us?

To ask that question is, I believe, to answer it.

America is the only country in the history of the world founded explicitly and principally upon the concept of individual rights.

At root, there’s really only one way to infringe upon another’s rights, and that is through the instigation of force. Quoting the 19th century political thinker Auberon Herbert:

Nobody has the moral right to seek his own advantage by force. That is the one unalterable, inviolable condition of a true society. Whether we are many, or whether we are few, we must learn only to use the weapons of reason, discussion, and persuasion…. As long as men are willing to make use of force for their own ends, or to make use of fraud, which is only force in disguise, wearing a mask, and evading our consent, just as force with violence openly disregards it – so long we must use force to restrain force. That is the one and only one right employment of force … force in the defense of the plain simple rights of property, public or private, in a world, of all the rights of self-ownership – force used defensively against force used aggressively (Auberon Herbert, The Principles of Voluntaryism, 1897).

As Auberon Herbert notes, force can be direct, as in assault and rape, or indirect, as in fraud or extortion. There’s no other way to breach rights than through the (direct or indirect) instigation of force.

Laws that restrict freedom of production and trade (such as cap-and-trade laws) are an indirect use of force.

Trade tariffs are an indirect use of force.

Military conscription is a direct use of force.

Rights, I repeat, are a formal codification of human freedom. This of course includes the freedom to trade.

Rights are ethical principles, and they are political principles. As such, rights delimit human freedom in large groups.

This latter thing is emphasized because rights would not need to be discovered if you lived alone, or even if you lived in a small and insular society.

Rights derive from three things: human individuation, human society, and the power of choice which gives rise to moral agency.

Rights are discoveries, not inventions.

One proof of this is found in the fact that the only alternative to acting by right is acting by permission. Whose permission?

Answering that question is where you’ll begin to glimpse the true nature of rights: if humans only act by permission, who gives permission to those whose permission the rest of us are acting under? And who gives permission to those above, and so on?

Answer: no one — because rights are inalienable in the literal sense: they are not granted, and they cannot be revoked or transferred.

In the final analysis, there’s only the right to your own life: all others – from liberty, to property, to the pursuit of happiness – are an extension of that one.

Those who hold that life is valuable, hold, by implication, that men ought not to be prevented from carrying on life-sustaining activities. In other words, if it is said to be ‘right’ that they should carry them on, then, by permutation, we get the assertion that they ‘have a right’ to carry them on. Clearly the conception of ‘natural rights’ originates in recognition of the truth that if life is justifiable, there must be a justification for the performance of acts essential to its preservation; and, therefore, a justification for those liberties and claims which make such acts possible (Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State, 1884).

The crux of freedom is rights.

The crux of rights is human individuation and moral agency.

A deep connection exists between the right to life and the right to property. The importance of this connection cannot be overstated, yet it is precisely this connection that the leftwing and rightwing are both equally ignorant of.

Quoting Claude Frédéric Bastiat:

Each of us has a natural right to defend his person, his liberty, and his property. These are the three basic requirements of life, and the preservation of any one of them is completely dependent upon the preservation of the other two. For what are our faculties but the extension of our individuality? And what is property but an extension of our faculties? … Man can live and satisfy his wants only by ceaseless labor, and by the ceaseless application of his faculties to natural resources. This process is property (Claude Frédéric Bastiat, The Law, 1848).

Property is “not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth. The right and interest which a man has in lands and chattels to the exclusion of others. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner as he pleases” (Lectric Law Library).

That is precisely why the crux of freedom and free markets is private property.

It is also why environmentalism, as all other forms of socialism, is inherently anti-freedom.

The reason that laissez faire is the proper social system is not because it “works best,” as many nominal defenders of free markets never tire of telling us. Laissez faire is proper, rather, because it is just. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only economic system that respects and protects the inalienable right to life, liberty, property, and free exchange.

One must never forget: money is property. Money is the symbol of your labor.

The root of real wealth is production.

Compulsory (as opposed to voluntary) taxation is a breach of property rights. It is also, again in the words of Bastiat, “legalized plunder.”

Individual rights have been under siege since the moment they were first brought into the light. And yet they’ve remained remarkably resilient. The reason they’ve remained resilient is that they are in a certain sense self-evident: we each, as John Locke said, “have a property in our own person.”

That is the fundamental principle behind rights, and property is an extension of person, nothing more and nothing less.

If you believe in human freedom, you perforce believe in the freedom to trade – fully. For if humans are not allowed to trade freely, humans are not truly free.

No freedom or justice can exist if rights, including property rights, do not exist.

Indeed, the very word rights has its origins in ancient Roman law and is related to the Roman word jus, as in justice. According to historian J. Stuart Jackson, jus “is wider than that of positive law laid down by authority, and denotes an order morally binding on the members of the community.” In the Roman sense of the word, “right” meant “what is just.”

Rights entitle holders to certain freedoms – specifically, the freedom to act in a certain way. Notice the phrase “freedom to act”; it is a crucial distinction because rights do not assure you of anything except the freedom to try.

What, though, fundamentally, is the stuff of rights? Of what are they made of?

To begin with, rights are not primaries: they are second-order principles that derive from something deeper. And that something is a thing which is very specific within the human condition. It is the faculty of choice.

If human behavior were automatic, as it is with animals, there would be no question of rights because any action we undertook would not be chosen. Human action would be neither moral nor immoral but amoral, and rights would therefore not exist.

The grizzly bear who mauls the innocent child is not evil. The man who mauls the innocent child is.

Thus rights are the link between ethics and politics.

Which is why Herbert Spencer and other freethinkers regarded rights as “ethical-political precepts.”

Quoting Samuel Adams:

Among the natural rights are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can…. Rights are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

Rights are another of these things that everyone thinks he understands, but which in fact almost nobody does.

To get some idea of how poorly understood the nature of rights is, one need only look at the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and observe the sheer number of times one would have to breach the rights (usually in the form of property expropriation – i.e.: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay”) of some individual somewhere to achieve even a fraction of that Declaration’s stated goals. The UN’s Declaration of Human Rights is a tour-de-force of postmodern, multicultural, neo-Marxist non-thought.

Leftwingers tell us we have the right to healthcare, the right to a job, the right to a smoke-free work environment, and so on.

Rightwingers, on the other hand, say we do not have the right to open our liquor stores on Sunday, we do not have the right to consensual sex with prostitutes, we do not have the right to gamble, et cetera.

Despite what you’ve been told, these views are not opposites; they are a variation on an identical theme, and their common denominator is this: Humans do not possess the inalienable right to life and property, and government bureaucrats are better suited than we ourselves to tell us how we must live. Yet the fact is, there is nothing in nature, neither human nature nor nature apart from humans, that gives government bureaucrats legitimate authority over the person or property of any other human being.

To say that we have the “right to healthcare,” or the “right to a job,” or the “right to a smoke-free work environment” is the same as saying we have the right to the life, labor, and property of another, which we do not and cannot – by virtue of what rights are.

Rights by definition preclude any claim to the person and property of another, even if that person is a doctor.

To say that humans do not have the right to open their liquor stores on Sunday if they choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to have consensual sex with prostitutes if they choose, or to say that humans do not have the right to gamble and use drugs if they choose, is the same as saying your life is not yours by right but belongs in some measure to bureaucrats, and that humans to that extent exist only by those bureaucrats’ permission — this in spite of the fact that no government and no governmental bureaucracy in the history of the world has ever proved itself more capable of running the individual’s life better than the individual herself.

Government compulsion, rightwing or left, is the antithesis of individual rights.

There is no such thing as a “collective right,” not in any variation.

Rights, by definition, can only belong to the individuals who make up any “collective.”

That is why the very term individual rights is pleonastic in the ultimate purport, albeit necessarily so: the very definition of the word presupposes individual, since it is only individuals who can properly possess rights.

Quoting George Reisman, who is echoing his friend and mentor Ludwig von Mises:

Only individuals exist; collectives consist of nothing but individuals. Only the individual thinks; only the individual acts; only the life of the individual has value and is important. All rights are rights of individuals.

As it happens, there’s an absolutely foolproof method that exists for determining if something is a right or not:

Your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

If you follow that simple principle, and if you remember that property is nothing more than an extension of person, and that money is also property, you’ll never confuse the issue of rights.


[This article appeared, in a slightly altered form, in Chapter 30 of my book].

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Legalizing Drugs

Everyone believes in freedom — until everyone finds out what freedom actually means. Then almost no one believes in it.

Freedom means you are left alone; you are neither helped nor hindered. And that’s all it means.

Rightwing politicos and leftwing politicos don’t usually agree on specifics, but they do often agree on principle: namely, that government’s proper sphere of authority does extend beyond protection against the initiation of force.

Humans, say today’s politicians, both right and left, aren’t capable of flourishing without the aid of bureaucrats; so these bureaucrats must help us live our lives for us.

Nowhere is this (unquestioned) conviction made clearer than in the issue of drugs.

Drugs, like prostitution, provide us with a good example of how the rightwing and the left are not fundamentally opposed but merely disagree on superficialities, insofar as both sides agree that not all drugs should be legal.

This notion has been so thoroughly inculcated into the mind’s of Americans that to question its legitimacy at all is considered lunatic-fringe thinking.

True, there are representatives on both sides of the political spectrum who support legalizing marijuana and perhaps a few other drugs. But start talking about legalizing all drugs on principle, or mention doing away with drinking-age laws on principle, and all liquor laws on principle, or speak of legalizing gambling and prostitution in all states and cities — and then you really begin to sort out the men from the boys.

That principle is the principle that it is not within the proper sphere of government to be involved in these aspects of human lives.

If we each possess the right to our own life and only our own life — and we do — then using drugs is obviously the right of each individual. The fact that it has become unquestionable to the majority that we do not possess the right to use drugs is we choose is a sad testament to the power of custom.

It is a sad testament to how people get so used to thinking about something in one way that changing minds becomes absolutely out of the question.

Yet if you believe in freedom, you not only should but must believe in the legalization of all drugs. If you do not, then you do not believe in freedom, and you must choose: freedom or statism.

This point can be made on principle alone, and it is a foolproof argument, the first and strongest line of defense. But it will not satisfy those who believe the proper scope of government does extend into telling us how we may and may not live.

It is frequently argued, for example, by the religious contingent, that if you legalize drugs, the usage of drugs will increase.

“Common sense and common experience tell us this,” says lawyer and radio talk-show host Dan Caplis, incessantly.

Next, we’re offered as evidence that the number of drinkers did increase after prohibition — a statement which is, at best, misleading, and here’s why:

Prior to prohibition, when drinking was still legal, the number of drinkers in this country was on a significant downward trend. For a decade leading up to prohibition, fewer and fewer people were drinking.

This fact is clear and not in dispute. But when, in 1920, the moralizers and busybodies got their way and legislated that the rest of the country must live as they deemed appropriate, and prohibition was then made into law, drinking still continued its downward trend. This went on for about three years.

It is very important to reiterate that the downward trend in drinking began long before drinking had been made illegal.

In the middle of prohibition — when drinking was still illegal — the number of drinkers began gradually to rise.

It continued to do so throughout the rest of prohibition, so that when, in December of 1933, prohibition was finally repealed, that upward trend continued for about a decade. But it was only the continuation of a trend that had already begun while drinking was illegal. This is a critical fact, but one you’ll never hear mention of when you hear people talking about “the number of drinkers increasing after prohibition.”

The next time someone says that “repealing prohibition increased the number of drinkers in this country,” be clear what that means: it means the number of drinkers was already increasing throughout the latter two-thirds of prohibition, and that the upward trend plateaued and then declined a decade after drinking was legalized anew.

Ask yourself also these questions: if, as the religious propound, making substances illegal prevents their usage, how is it that the number of drinkers began rising when alcohol was still illegal?

How is it that in Holland, where many drugs are legal and even subsidized(!), how is it that usage has decreased?

What does this tell us about “common sense and common experience”?

How is it that in Switzerland, marijuana usage has decreased even though it’s been made legal? And Spain?

There are those, of course, who argue that if drugs are legal, crime will increase. This is the biggest canard of them all.

Rest assured, if crime is your concern, illegalization should be what you want done away with.

There exists right now a multi-trillion-dollar underworld built up around illegal drugs, which legalizing would instantaneously crush, and which, as it stands, no amount of law, legislation, or litigation can come close to stopping. Why? The law of supply and demand is unstoppable: if there is a demand for something, supply will meet it, no matter what. All the conservative legislation imaginable cannot negate this fact. One might just as well try legislating against the tide.

When cigarettes and alcohol became so staggeringly taxed, do you know what happened? A gigantic blackmarket swept into the country. That meant more crime. People were smuggling in alcohol and cigarettes because these things could be sold for much cheaper on the blackmarket. They still are to this day.

Decriminalizing brings less crime.

For those who believe that if drugs are legalized, your kids are then more likely to use drugs, I urge you to remember that children have brains. Human beings have brains. We can learn, and we can be educated. We can be taught why not to use drugs. If you doubt the effectiveness of this, observe that cigarettes were legal for any age group until fairly recently, and the number of young smokers was sharply decreasing, and had been since the dangers of smoking were made known. Now that’s it’s illegal, teen smoking is on the rise again, and criminalizing doesn’t help.

Ask any honest school kid if he or she would have trouble getting drugs. Every honest school kid will tell you no. This despite the fact that drugs are illegal.

The inescapable law of supply and demand is why: if there’s a demand, supply will meet it. And no government bureaucracy and no middle-class morality can successfully fight it.

Making something illegal won’t decrease the supply of anything. It will only increase the underworld that provides the supply. This is a economic axiom.

Here’s another:

The only way to decrease supply is to curb demand.

The only way to curb demand is to inform, to educate, to decriminalize.

Each person must choose if he or she wants to use drugs or not, and whether those drugs are legal or illegal has little to do with the choice. There are many things that are legal and that every person has instant access to, but not everyone chooses to partake of. Why so?

The so-called war on drugs is a monumental waste of resources and money; it will continue to be so until the end of time. When something is made illegal, it develops a mystique. It entices. When something is legal, it becomes commonplace and mundane. It becomes no big deal. It is demystified.

Take, for instance, a person who’s grown up in an ultra-sheltered society and compare him or her to a person who’s grown up in the inner-city. Now drop them both off in downtown New York where there’s legal XXX shops on every street corner. Whom do you think will be more curious? And for whom do you think this will be more of a novelty?

And finally, for all the tax-happy liberals out there, think about this: if you legalize drugs, you can tax the living hell out of them. You can then use that tax money to educate with all your half-assed liberal programs, which benefit the “common good.” What more motivation do you need?

It is often said:

“Legalizing pot might be okay, but legalizing cocaine and methadrine, no way. I’ve known wealthy, white-collar, healthy, normal, successful businesspeople who’ve gotten so caught up in amphetamines that they’ve never been able to get off. They died. Suicide. OD. They’ve ruined their lives and the lives of their families. No way you should make these drugs legal.”

This is a repackaged version of the legalizing-creates-more-usage argument. It’s the same argument that drugs shouldn’t be legal because look at all the children born severely retarded and deformed because the mothers used crack throughout the pregnancy.

The first thing we must obviously note here is that all this happened (and still happens) even though drugs are illegal. Observe that making them illegal did not prevent these things from happening. Now ask yourself why.

Remember also that cigarettes and alcohol have ruined more lives and more families by far than every amphetamine combined. Should we therefore make alcohol and cigarettes illegal? And if not, why not? If it’s within the proper jurisdiction of government to run our lives, why shouldn’t we illegalize them?

And why, if that is government’s legitimate jurisdiction, draw the line at amphetamines, alcohol, and cigarettes? Why not let government run everything we consume — be it bacon, beer, or brats?

When gin made it into mainstream London, should it have been illegalized because it created such staggering addiction rates and ruined so many thousands of families?

We often hear: since alcohol can be and often is used in moderation, it should therefore be legal, whereas drugs cannot be used in moderation, and so should be illegal.

Leaving aside the questionable verity of such statements, since when did moderation become the standard for legalization versus illegalizing? That means, then, among other things, that for all those who can’t use alcohol or tobacco in moderation — for all, in other words, who are addicted (roughly half of all drinkers and more than ninety-five percent of all tobacco users) — these substances should be illegal? But for the rest, fine?

Freedom means you are left alone. It means you are neither helped nor hindered.

In this country, as in any just country, government’s proper role is not to be proscriptive or preventative.

In the words of Frederic Bastiat (1801 – 1850):

The nature of law is to maintain justice. There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are ‘just’ because the law makes them so (Frederic Bastiat, The Law).